Borges and Swedenborg: book launch and talk by William Rowlandson

William Rowlandson will present an exciting expoloration of the labyrinthine worlds of two of literature’s greatest and most original minds—Jorge Luis Borges and Emanuel Swedenborg—to celebrate the publication of his new book Imaginal Landscapes. William’s book is a concise yet deep-reaching study which decsribes and contextualizes Borges’s often undervalued appreciation of Swedenborg. William will show how Swedenborg’s visionary’s influence has gone a long way to explain Borges’s preoccupations with parallel existences, the infinite, and the mystery of language. Imaginal Landscapes is also an investigation into the problematic semantics of mysticism (and its surrounding scholarship), and it raises important questions about the criteria we use to assess the lives and works of those thinkers and writers who have come to be labelled as ‘mystics’. The talk will be preceded by a pinao accompaniment and free wine and refreshments will be served.

WILLIAM ROWLANDSON is Senior Lecturer in Hispanic Studies at the University of Kent. He is the author of Borges, Swedenborg and Mysticism (Peter Lang, 2013) and has published widely on Latin American cultural and political history including the history of Guantánamo Bay and Cuba during the War on Terror. He has written for the Guardian and has also recently edited Daimonic Imagination: Uncanny Intelligence with Angela Voss (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013).